Barbara Ehrenreich comments on working in America

October 21, 2008

Surely
you have heard by now of the imminent socialist takeover of America, and if you
find the prospect unlikely, ask yourself: How many socialists do you know who
lost millions in the recent stock market crashes? Just as I thought—none—and
that's not only because you don't know any socialists. The truth is that we, the
Socialist International Conspiracy, not only saw this coming, we are the ones
who made it happen.

The plan took shape during a particularly intense
criticism/self-criticism session at our 2000 annual convention in a booth at an
Akron IHOP. We realized that we'd been recruiting no more new members per year
than the Green Bay Packers and that, despite all our efforts, more Americans
have been taken aboard UFO's than have embraced the historic promise of
socialism. So we decided to suspend our usual work of standing on street corners
and hissing, "Hey, how'd you like to live in a workers' paradise?” Instead of
building socialism, one worker at a time, we would focus on destroying
capitalism, hedge fund by hedge fund.

First, we selected a cadre of crusty punks from the streets of
Seattle, stripped off their Che t-shirts, suited them up in Armani's and
wingtips, and introduced them to the concepts of derivatives and dental floss.
Then we shipped them to Wall Street with firm instructions: Make as much money
as you can, as fast as you can, and as soon as the money starts rolling in, send
it out to make more money by whatever dodgy means you can find – subprime loans,
credit default swaps, pyramid schemes – anything goes. And oh yes: Spend your
own earnings in the most flamboyantly gross ways you can think of -- $10,000
martinis, fountains of champagne – so as to fan the flames of class resentment.

These brave comrades did far better than we could have imagined,
quickly adapting to lives of excess and greed punctuated only by squash games at
the Century Club. But we could not have inflicted such massive damage to
capitalism if we hadn't also planted skilled agents in high places within the
government and various quasi-governmental agencies. When all this is over, Phil
Gramm, for example—the former senator and McCain economics advisor -- will be
getting a Hero of Socialism award for his courageous battle against financial
regulation. That's the only name I can name at this moment, but I will tell you
this: If you happened to have been in a playground in the suburbs of DC any time
in the last few years, and noticed an impeccably dressed elderly man poking
around under rocks, that was a certain Federal Reserve Chairman, looking for his
weekly orders from the central committee.

Things were going swimmingly until about a week ago, when the
capitalists suddenly staged a counter-coup. We had thought that the
nationalization of the banks would bring capitalism to its knees, but instead,
the capitalists were craftily using it to privatize the government. Goldman
Sachs, former home of Henry Paulson, has taken the lead, planting its
agents so thickly about the erstwhile public sector as to earn the nickname
"Government Sachs." Among the former Goldman Sachs operatives now running the
country, in addition to Paulson, are the president's chief of staff, the
chairman of the New York Fed, the man appointed to take over A.I.G., and the
35-year-old boy wonder selected to oversee the bail-out program.

According to the New York Times, "Goldman supporters" insist there
is no "conspiracy" and not a black helicopter in sight – just a bunch of
public-spirited investment bankers sacrificing their normal 8-figure salaries
for the good of the nation. But we socialists know a conspiracy when we see one,
and some in our ranks are complaining bitterly that as capitalism began to
collapse, the bankers seized the life raft that was intended to save the
laid-off, the foreclosed-upon, and the exploited masses in general.

Ah
well, we socialists still have the election to look forward to. After months of
studying the candidates' economic plans, we have determined that one of them,
and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With
high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses
John McCain!

October 01, 2008

This year marks the 160th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto and
capitalism, aka “free enterprise,” seems willing to observe the occasion by
dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might
run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans.
Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the
populace has been leaning toward the latter. An email whipping around the web
this morning has the subject line “Sign on Wall St. yesterday,” and shows a
hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, “JUMP! You Fuckers!”

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,”
for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat
really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx
and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of
wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers
got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The
last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is
the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a
mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion:
The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the “means of
production,” and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original,
pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn’t happen, of course, at
least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly
acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing
pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated
to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second
jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long
waits for the bathroom.

But all this immiseration – combined with fabulous enrichment at the top – did
end up destabilizing the capitalist system, if only because , in the last few
years, America’s substitute for decent wages has been easy credit. Until about a
year ago, we got almost daily messages, by telemarketer and by mail, urging us
to consolidate our debts, refinance our homes, transfer our debts from credit
card to another, and try tasty new mortgages that didn’t even require a down
payment. All too often, we bit. It sounded so reasonable, for example, not to
let our assets just “sit” in our houses but to start spending that money now.

At the other, Lear jet, end of the economic spectrum, there was the problem of
what to do with too much money. Yes, this can be a problem. Some of the
super-rich have to hire consultants to help them spend their money: Where do
you get a $20,000 bottle of wine or find a Picasso for the bathroom wall? More
seriously, there was the problem of what to invest in. As Chuck Collins of the
Working Group on Extreme Inequality has pointed out, huge concentrations of
wealth can function like rogue waves, smashing around recklessly in their search
for ever higher returns. A lot of these money waves flowed, directly or
indirectly, into the dodgy credit schemes that were engulfing the un-rich
majority, leaving even the fat cats imperiled by the toxic debts of the subprime
class.

Marx’s argument was that the coexistence of great wealth for the few and growing
poverty for the many is not only morally objectionable, it’s also inherently
unstable. He may have been wrong about the reasons for the instability, but no
one can any longer deny it’s there. When the greed of the rich collided with the
needs of the poor – for a home, for example – the result was a global credit
meltdown.

Obviously, the way to address the crisis is to deal with the poverty and
inequality that led to it: bail out people facing foreclosures, increase food
stamp allotments, extent unemployment insurance, and, make a massive
job-generating, public investment in infrastructure, and, since medical debts
are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, enact universal health
insurance immediately. But not even Obama, whose lawn sign I still proudly
display, seems to have the stomach for such a “trickle upwards” approach. He has
announced that he won’t bother taking the bail-out as an opportunity to change
the bankruptcy law so that people facing foreclosure can renegotiate their
mortgages.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto – although I’m hoping that capitalism
survives this one, if only because there’s no alternative ready at hand. At the
very least, we should get some regulation and serious oversight out of any
bail-out deal, meaning that, yes, the economy will look a little less like “free
enterprise.” But one thing we should have learned in the last week, if not the
last year, is that, when applied to enterprise, “freedom” can be just another
word for someone else’s pain.

September 24, 2008

(A
shorter version of this appears as an op ed in the New York Times today)

Greed –
and its crafty sibling, speculation – are the designated culprits for the
ongoing financial crisis, but another, much admired, habit of mind should get
its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American,
positive thinking. As promoted by Oprah, scores of megachurch pastors, and an
endless flow of self-help bestsellers, the idea is to firmly belief that you
will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so,
but because thinking things, “visualizing” them – ardently and with
concentration – actually makes them happen. You will be able to pay that
adjustable rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands
of bad mortgages into giga-profits, the reasoning goes, if only you truly
believe that you can.

Positive
thinking is endemic to American culture – from weight loss programs to cancer
support groups – and in the last two decades it put down deep roots in the
corporate world as well. Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more
than $15 an hour unless you’re a “positive person” -- doubt-free, uncritical,
and smiling—and no one becomes a CEO by issuing warnings of possible disaster.
According to a rare skeptic, a Washington-based crisis management consultant I
interviewed on the eve of the credit meltdown in 2007, even the magical idea
that you can have whatever you truly want has been “viral” in the business
culture. All the tomes in airport bookstores’ business sections scream out
against “negativity” and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic
and brimming with confidence—a message companies relentlessly reinforced by
treating their white collar employees to manic motivational speakers and
revival-like motivational events. The top guys, meanwhile, would go off to get
pumped up in exotic locales with the likes of success guru Tony Robbins. Those
who still failed to get with the program could be subjected to personal
“coaching” or of course, shown to the door.

The same
frothy wave of mandatory optimism swept through the once-sober finance industry.
On their websites, scores of motivational speakers proudly list companies like
Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch among their clients. Angelo Mozilo, the former
CEO of Countrywide Mortgage whose subprime ventures precipitated the entire
crisis, was known for his congenital optimism and described in the Guardian
earlier this year as “absurdly upbeat” even as his industry unraveled. No one
was psychologically prepared for hard times, when they hit, because, according
to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring
it on. In May, the New York Times reported that Merrill, caught up short, was
suddenly trying to “temper the Pollyannas in its ranks,” and force its analysts
to occasionally say the word “sell.”

For those
at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, all this positive thinking must not
have seemed delusional at all. They actually could have almost anything they
wanted, just by expressing the desire. CEO compensation has ballooned in recent
years, creating the new class of billionaires and centi-millionaires who inhabit
Lear jets and four-figure a night hotel rooms, who can dispatch a private plane
who pick up a favorite wine, or a pet, they happen to have left in the Hamptons.
According to a new book from the UK, Unjust Rewards by Polly Toynbee and
David Walker, these masters of the universe tend to be seriously uninformed
about how the other 99 percent lives and, Toynbee told me, often uncomprehending
of the financial operations – the derivatives, CDS’s, etc. – that their wealth
is derived from. If you live in a bubble of perfect wish-fulfillment, how could
you imagine that, for example, some poor fellow in Cleveland might run up
against unexpected medical bills or car problems that could waylay his mortgage
payments?

Americans
did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white
Protestant settlers and their descendents, was a grim Calvinism that offered
wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at
all. You might work hard and still fail; you certainly wouldn’t get anywhere by
adjusting your attitude or dreamily “visualizing” success. Calvinists thought
“negatively” as we would say today, carrying a weight of guilt and foreboding
that sometimes broke their spirits. It was in response to this harsh ethos that
positive thinking arose-- among mystics, lay healers, and transcendentalists –
in the 19th century, with its crowd-pleasing message that God, or the
universe, is really on your side, that you can actually have whatever you want,
if the wanting is focused enough.

When it
comes to how we think, “negative” is not the only alternative to “positive.” As
the case histories of depressives show, consistent pessimism can be just as
baseless and deluded as its opposite. The alternative to both is realism –
seeing the risks, having the courage to bear bad news, and being prepared for
famine as well as plenty. Now, with our savings, our homes and our livelihoods
on the line, we ought to give it a try.

August 12, 2008

For heartsick former supporters of John Edwards, this week offers an edifying
tabloid alternative: the civil trial of Victoria Osteen, wife of megachurch
minister and televangelist Joel Osteen, for assaulting a flight attendant. The
issue was what is sometimes described as a “spill” and sometimes as a “stain” on
the armrest of Mrs. Osteen’s first class seat, which the flight attendant
refused to clean up with sufficient alacrity because she was busy assisting
others board. Although there is no evidence that the spill consisted of
tuberculosis-ridden phlegm or avian flu-rich bird poop, Osteen was mightily
pissed, allegedly pushing and punching the flight attendant and making such a
ruckus that the Osteen family had to be removed from the flight.

I would be more sympathetic to the flight attendant, Sharon Brown, if she
weren’t demanding 10 percent of Osteen’s fortune to compensate for injuries
including a “loss of faith” and hemorrhoids somehow incurred from a frontal
assault. But it isn’t easy being a flight attendant in this era of layoffs, pay
cuts and packed planes – certainly not compared to being a millionaire on her
way to Vail. Whatever dubious substance Victoria Osteen faced on that first
class armrest, she should have been able to derive some serenity from the fact
that the church she co-pastors draws 40,000 worshippers a week and that her
husband has been dubbed “America’s Most Influential Christian.”

Just another celebrity meltdown set off by insufficiently servile servers?
Recall Russell Crowe’s 2005 assault with a telephone on a SoHo hotel clerk, or
Naomi Campbell’s attacks with similar weapons –cell phone and Blackberry-- on
members of her own staff. But there’s a curious antecedent here that Christians
would do well to ponder: In 1997, another megachurch pastor and leading
televangelist – Robert Schuller – was prosecuted for an eerily similar first
class tantrum.

Schuller, like the Osteens, is a proponent of positive thinking – the
doctrine that God intends for you to be rich, healthy and generally “great”
right here in this life. While politicos have focused on the Christian Right,
there’s been far less attention to the fast growing brand of Christianity Light,
also represented by televangelists Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar.
Positive thinking is the theology of the modern megachurch, and it avoids all
mention of sin –including the “sins” of abortion and homosexuality – lest such
“negative” topics turn off any potential converts or “seekers.” Its promise is
that you can have anything you want simply by “visualizing” it or, as Osteen
puts it, “believing for it” -- a doctrine derided by some Christian critics as
“name it and claim it.”

Schuller faced a different biohazard on his first class flight in ’97 –
cheese. When the flight attendant gave him a fruit and cheese plate for dessert,
Schuller insisted that the cheese be removed. The flight attendant refused,
explaining, reasonably enough, that all the fruit had been plated with cheese
and could be contaminated, from a cheese- allergy sufferer’s point of view . But
the pastor was simply on a low-fat diet and did not want to see the cheese on
his plate, so he got out of his seat and accosted the flight attendant, shaking
him violently by the shoulders. Schuller ended up paying an $1100 fine and
undergoing six months of police supervision.

In the theology of Christian positive thinking, “everything happens for a
reason.” The Osteens may conclude that the divine intention was to prod them
into to emulating Joyce Meyers and Creflo Dollar by investing in a private jet.
But there’s another possible message from on high: that this brand of
Christianity fosters a distinctly un-Christian narcissism.

Consider the ways the Lord works in the life of the Osteens, as recounted
in Joel’s book Your Best Life Now, which has sold four million copies and
is graced by a back cover photo of the smiling couple. Acting through Victoria,
who kept “speaking words of faith and victory” on the subject, Joel was led to
build the family “an elegant home.” On other occasions, God intervened to save
Joel from a speeding ticket and to get him not only a good parking spot but “the
premier spot in that parking lot.” Why God did not swoop down with a sponge and
clean up the offending stain on the armrest remains a mystery, because Osteen’s
deity is less the Master of the Universe than an obliging factotum.

Plenty of Christians have already made the point that the positive
thinking of Christianity Light is demeaning to God, and I leave them to pursue
this critique. More importantly, from a secular point of view, it’s dismissive
of other humans, and not only flight attendants. If a person is speeding,
shouldn’t he get a ticket to deter him from endangering others? And if Osteen
gets the premier parking spot, what about all the other people consigned to the
remote fringes of the lot? Christianity, at best, is about a sacrificial love
for others, not about getting to the head of the line.

If the Osteens’ brand of religion is what flight attendant Sharon Brown
lost faith in as a result of being manhandled by on that plane to Vail, then the
suit should be dropped, because Victoria Osteen has already done her enough of a
favor.

July 28, 2008

A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene
Balderrama of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a
little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Mortgage
Corporation – may its name live in infamy – was to auction off her home,
Balderrama killed herself with her husband’s rifle.

This is not
the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote
his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled “Why No Outrage?” “One might
infer from the lack of popular anger,” the famed Wall Street contrarian wrote,
“that the credit crisis was God's fault rather than the doing of the bankers
and the rating agencies and the government's snoozing watchdogs.” For contrast,
he cites the spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when
lawyer/agitator Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that “We want the
accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay
by our firesides by force if necessary…”

Grant could
have found even more bracing examples of resistance in the 1930s, when farmers
and tenants used mob power – and sometimes firearms – to fight foreclosures and
evictions. For more on that, I consulted Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the
classic text Poor People’s Movements: Why
They Succeed, How They Fail, who told me that in the early 30s, a number of
cities were so shaken by the resistance that they declared moratoriums on
further evictions. A 1931 riot by Chicago tenants who had fallen behind on
their rent, for example, had left three dead and three police officers injured.

According
to Piven, these actions were often spontaneous. A group of unemployed men would
get word of a scheduled eviction and march through the streets, gathering
crowds as they went. Arriving at the site of the eviction, they would move the
furniture back into the apartment and stay around to protect the threatened
tenants. In one instance in Detroit, it took 100 cops to evict a single family.
Also in Detroit, Piven said, “two families protected their apartments by
shooting their landlord and were acquitted by a sympathetic jury.”

What a
difference 80 years makes. When the police and the auctioneers arrived at
Balderrama’s house, the family gun had already been used – on the victim of
foreclosure herself. I don’t know how “worthy” a debtor she was – the family
had been through bankruptcies before, though probably not as a result of
Caribbean vacations and closets full of designer clothes. It was an Adjustable
Rate Mortgage that did them in, and Balderrama, who managed the family’s
finances, had apparently been unwilling to tell her husband that their
ever-rising monthly mortgage payments were eating up his earnings as a plumber.

Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to
debt. James Scurlock’s brilliant documentary, Maxed Out, features the families
of two college students who killed themselves after being overwhelmed by credit
card debt. “All the people we talked to had considered suicide at least once,”
Scurlock told a gathering of the National Assocition of Consumer Bankruptcy
Attorneys in 2007. According to the Los Angeles Times, lawyers in the audience
backed him up, “describing clients who showed up at their offices with cyanide,
or threatened, ‘If you don’t help me, I’ve got a gun in my car.’”

India
may be the trend-setter here, with an estimated 150,000 debt-ridden farmers
succumbing to suicide since 1997. With guns in short supply in rural India, the
desperate farmers have taken to drinking the pesticides meant for their crops.

Dry
your eyes, already: Death is an
effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you
too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If
you can’t pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in
addition – like an ever-rising number of Americans – you’re no longer needed at
the workplace, then there’s no further point to your existence. I’m not saying
that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where
one’s credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal
self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, “Just shoot me!”

The
alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns,
metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn’t God, or some
abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans
–often masked as financial institutions – did that, (and you can find a
convenient list of names in Nomi Prins’s article in the current issue of Mother
Jones.) Most of them, except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high
rollers, fattening themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know
it’s so 1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?

June 23, 2008

Everyone talks about our terrible dependency on oil – foreign and otherwise –
but hardly anyone mentions what it is. Fossil fuel, all right, but whose
fossils? Mostly tiny plants called diatoms, but quite possibly a few Barney-like
creatures went into the mix, like Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and other giant
reptiles that shared the Jurassic period with all those diatoms. What we are
burning in our cars and keeping our homes warm or cool with is, in other words,
a highly processed version of corpse juice.

Think of this for a moment, if only out of respect for the dead. There you
were, about 100 million years ago, maybe a contented little diatom or a great
big Brontosaurus stumbling around the edge of a tar pit – a lord of the earth.
And what are you now? A sludge of long-chain carbon molecules that will be
burned so that some mammalian biped can make a CVS run for Mountain Dew and
chips.

It’s an old human habit – living off the road kill of the planet. There’s
evidence, for example, that early humans were engaged in scavenging before they
figured out how to hunt for themselves. They’d scan the sky for circling
vultures, dash off to the kill site--hoping that the leopard that did the actual
hunting had sauntered off for a nap-- and gobble up what remained of the prey.
It was risky, but it beat doing your own antelope tracking.

We continue our career as scavengers today, attracted not by vultures but by
signs saying “Safeway” or “Giant.” Inside these sites, we find bits of dead
animals wrapped neatly in plastic. The killing has already been done for us –
usually by underpaid immigrant workers rather than leopards.

I say to my fellow humans: It’s time to stop feeding off the dead and grow
up! I don’t know about food, but I have a plan for achieving fuel self-suffiency
in less time than it takes to say “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” The idea
came to me from reports of the growing crime of French fry oil theft: Certain
desperate individuals are stealing restaurants’ discarded cooking oil, which can
then be used to fuel cars. So the idea is: why not could skip the French fry
phase and harvest high-energy hydrocarbons right from ourselves?

I’m talking about liposuction, of course, and it’s a mystery to me why it
hasn’t occurred to any of those geniuses who are constantly opining about fuel
prices on MSNBC. The average liposuction removes about half a gallon of liquid
fat, which may not seem like much. But think of the vast reserves our nation is
literally sitting on! Thirty percent of Americans are obese, or about 90 million
individuals or 45 million gallons of easily available fat – not from dead
diatoms but from our very own bellies and butts.

This is the humane alternative to biofuels derived directly from erstwhile
foodstuffs like corn. Biofuels, as you might have noticed, are exacerbating the
global food crisis by turning edible plants into gasoline. But we could put
humans back in the loop by first turning the corn into Doritos and hence into
liposuctionable body fat. There would be a reason to live again, even a
patriotic rationale for packing on the pounds.

True, liposuction is not risk-free, as the numerous doctors’ websites on the
subject inform us. And those of us who insist on driving gas guzzlers may soon
start depleting their personal fat reserves, much as heroin addicts run out of
useable veins. But the gaunt, punctured, look could become a fashion statement.
Already, the combination of a tiny waist and a huge carbon footprint—generated
by one’s Hummer and private jet -- is considered a sign of great wealth.

And think what it would do for our nation’s self-esteem. We may not lead the
world in scientific innovation, educational achievement, or low infant
mortality, but we are the global champions of obesity. Go to
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity and you’ll
find America well ahead of the pack when it comes to personal body fat, while
those renowned oil-producers --Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran-- aren’t even
among the top 29. All we need is a healthy dose of fat pride and for CVS to
start marketing home liposuction kits. That run for Mountain Dew and chips could
soon be an energy-neutral proposition.

May 12, 2008

In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary
Clinton’s destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral
superiority, hailing Clinton’s “no-holds-barred pugnacity” and her media
reputation as “nasty” and “ruthless.” Future female presidential candidates will
owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, “when Hillary Clinton broke through
the glass floor and got down with the boys.”

I share Faludi’s glee – up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue
that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a
racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and
repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn’t
just break through the “glass floor,” she set a new low for floors in general,
and would, if she could have got within arm’s reach, have rubbed the broken
glass into Obama’s face.

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that
the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female
leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous
examples from chimpanzee society, “rooted in biology.” The counter-example of
Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the
sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that
“biology is not destiny.” But it was still a good reason to vote for a
prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical
feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval
Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran –along, of course,
with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore
even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk
addicts of the species. Watch out – was her distinctly unladylike message to
Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them – or I’ll rip you a new one.

There’s a reason why it’s been so easy for men to overlook women’s capacity
for aggression. As every student of Women’s Studies 101 knows, what’s called
aggression in men is usually trivialized as “bitchiness” in women: Men get
angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So
give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She’s been visibly
angry for months, if not decades, and it can’t all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless
aggression? Any illusions I had about the innate moral superiority of women
ended four years ago with Abu Ghraib. Recall that three out of the five prison
guards prosecuted for the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners were
women. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski, and the top
U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the
status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. Not to
mention that the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the
occupation of Iraq at the time was Condoleezza Rice.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the
capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then
Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run
for the Senate.

It’s important –even kind of exhilarating – for women to embrace their inner
bitch, but the point should be to expand our sense of human possibility, not to
enshrine aggression as a virtue. Women can behave like the warrior queen
Boadicea, credited with slaughtering 70,000, many of them civilians, or like
Margaret Thatcher, who attempted to dismantle the British welfare state. Men,
for their part, are free to take as their role models the pacifist leaders
Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Biology conditions us in all kinds of
ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the
worst possible way – by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn’t really
need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women
aren’t wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once
thought to be uniquely and genetically female – such as compassion and an
aversion to violence – can be found in either sex, and sometimes it’s a man who
best upholds them.

April 29, 2008

Truckers live in an alternative dimension, at least so I conclude when trying
to figure out how to meet up with the convoy of trucks coming into to DC to
protest high diesel fuel prices on Monday. JB, aka Mike Schaffner, one of the
organizers of the action, calls early in the morning to suggest various highway
intersections, and I have to explain there’s no way a pedestrian can be just
standing on one the super-highways around DC. We eventually settle on a spot in
a desolate area of southeastern DC, but even so, I probably couldn’t have made
the connection without the genes of a grandfather who rode the rails. When I
hear the honking, low and steady, and see the first trucks rising out from an
underpass, I scramble up to a narrow walkway along their route and start waving
frantically. Everyone waves back nicely, and about the fifth truck actually
stops. It’s JB and I leap aboard.

JB and I have become friends-by-phone in the weeks since I blogged about the
first truckers’ protests in the beginning of April, but all I knew about him as
a physical presence is that he always wears a black cowboy hat. Its brim is
turned down, locating him in Larry McMurtry’s rather than John Wayne’s West, and
his eyes twinkle deeply when he smiles, which is pretty much all the time.
Everything seems to delight him: Being in DC for the first time, having 250
trucks behind him, the friendliness of the tourists on the street as we inch our
way toward the Mall.

Since he hasn’t been home in Texas since January 1, this – the “bobtail” of a
truck based in New Jersey – is JB’s world. There’s a neatly made bed behind our
seats and a laptop that can swivel into view while he’s driving, as well, of
course, as a GPS, a cell phone and CB radio. From this little control room,
which is also a workplace and a living space, JB has helped assemble the
hundreds of truckers and their families who are with us now. It’s a life
stripped bare: He ordinarily eats only one meal a day (nothing fried or from a
buffet), sleeps rarely (just an hour and half last night), and drinks no coffee
(“it leads to stops”) but admits to an occasional Red Bull.

We circle the Mall, slowly, triumphantly, twice. It’s hard to talk over the
honking and the excited CB chatter, but JB wants to know if I’ve ever been at a
demonstration in DC before. Ah, I explain, I go back to the 60s, but the most
recent one was an anti-war demonstration organized by the women’s group Code
Pink. He laughs, making me think he finds the name amusing. But no, he shows me
he has Code Pink in his cell phone. They had contacted him and will be joining
us at the rally at the Capitol.

We are to park the trucks at the RFK Stadium and walk from there to the
Capitol, giving us about a half an hour to mill around on foot in the parking
lot first. There’s a bobtail with “Truckin for Jesus” painted on it and, under
that, “Truckers and Citizens United.” There are Operation Desert Freedom caps
and a POW/MIA flag, as well signs indicting oil companies and “Wall Street
speculators.” I chat with members of the mostly African-American contingent of
DC dump truck drivers and with Belinda Raymond, a trucker’s wife from Maine, who
tells me that people in her area raised $9000 to send a convoy of trucks down
here, with the Knights of Columbus accounting for $2500 of that. Whole families
have come, and I see a boy carrying a sign saying “What about My Future?” A
smartly dressed woman from New Jersey carries a sign asking, “Got Milk? Not
Without a Truck.”

If there’s an ideology at work here I’d call it small-d democratic
fundamentalism: We own the government, we pay for it, and now it better do
something for us. In fact, JB is carrying hundreds of copies of the Code of
Ethics for Civil Servants he’s downloaded from the internet to hand out at the
Capitol and remind Congress of their duties. The only time I see his smile fade
is when the protest’s media coordinator – contributed pro bono by the liberal
think tank The Institute for Policy Studies – lays down the ground rules for a
meeting with Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) scheduled for the afternoon. “But he
works for us!” JB protests.

On the 45 minute long march from the stadium to the Capitol, things
degenerate toward the level of farce. No one had counted on the rain, which is
back in force, or on the fact that, as one guy puts it to me, they’re “truckers,
not walkers.” JB, I and a few others fall behind because JB insists on running
back to his truck and changing into a shirt printed with the American flag and
Constitution. Our little band includes Mike Groff, a heavily pierced
20-something from Pennsylvania who is one of the original organizers of the
protests and his pregnant wife Melissa. JB and Mike take turns pulling a wagon
carrying batteries for the sound system that will be used at the rally. The rain
turns into a torrent. We trudge through the ghetto, then on into a middle class
neighborhood sporting azaleas and Obama lawn signs, not entirely sure of our
direction and soaked to the skin. Melissa reassures me that, if we pee our
pants, which seems increasingly likely, no one will notice.

But things look up when we get the Capitol, thanks largely to Senator Susan
Collins (R, ME), who arranges for the truckers to stage a press conference
inside the Russell Building lobby and out of the rain. Three truckers – two
white and one black – speak about their dwindling livelihoods and the need for
immediate government action to push down fuel prices. I can’t fight my way
through the media to hear much of what they’re saying, but one speaker mentions
foreclosures. This is a wide-ranging cry from the strangled middle class –or
working class or whatever you want to call it—and all I can think is: Where are
the Democrats? Why aren’t they are pouring out of their offices to show support
for the truckers? And wouldn’t have been wonderful if Obama had shown up?
Because he’s not going to make it unless he learns to channel the frustration of
people like JB, Melissa and Mike.

That’s just my concern though. The whole event has been strictly nonpartisan.
The truckers are already focused on the May 1 Truckers and Citizens United
protest in New York City (see
www.theamericandriver.com). That one, JB tells me, will be in solidarity
with the San Francisco longshoremen’s May Day actions against the war.

April 07, 2008

Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say
about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” You
can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you
repossess. Take my job and I’ll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and
take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.

Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the
strongest form of action they can take – inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel
fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey
Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching “as far as the eye can see,” according
to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, they
slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed
into Harrisburg PA; they slowed down the Port of Tampa where 50 rigs sat idle in
protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to
pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests – by CB radio and internet – have a
specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators,
meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current
fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an
investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil
companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the
government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear
Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers’ protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators’
plight --first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine,
here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of
pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation’s goods – from
Cheerios to Chapstick --travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers’
strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options.
As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: “If all the truckers decide to
shut this country down, there’s going to be nothing they can do about it.”

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part
of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to
maintain this is not just about us,” “JB”-- which is his CB handle and stands
for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs-- told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his
way to Florida. “It’s about everybody – the homeowners, the construction
workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not
the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his
parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income.
Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of
Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be
damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

At least one of the truckers’ tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure
crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by
Daimler-Chrysler – only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the
statehouse in Augusta. “Repossession is something people don’t usually see,” he
says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys,
the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, “I don’t see
why you couldn’t make the payments.” To which Hayden responded, “See, I have to
pay for fuel and food, and I’ve eaten too many meals in my life to give that
up.”

Suppose homeowners were to start making their foreclosures into public
events-- inviting the neighbors and the press, at least getting someone to
camcord the children sitting disconsolately on the steps and the furniture
spread out on the lawn. Maybe, for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors
shower the bankers, when they arrive, with dollar bills and loose change, since
those bankers never can seem to get enough.

But the larger message of the truckers’ protest is about pride or, more
humbly put, self-respect, which these men channel from their roots. Dan Little
tells me, “My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, ‘If you
don’t stand up for yourself ain’t nobody gonna stand up for you.’” Go to
theamericandriver.com, run by JB and his brother in Texas, where you’re greeted
by a giant American flag, and you’ll find – among the driving tips, weather
info, and drivers’ favorite photos –the entire Constitution and Declaration of
Independence. “The last time we faced something as impacting on us,” JB tells
me, “There was a revolution.”

The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There’s talk
of a protest in Indiana on the 18th, another in New York City, and a
giant convergence of trucks on DC on the 28th. Who knows what it will
all add up to? Already, according to JB, some of the big trucking companies are
threatening to fire any of their employees who join the owner-operators’
protests.

But at least we have one shining example of defiance of the face of economic
assault. There comes a point, sooner or later, when you stop scrambling around
on all fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers all over the country, you
finally stand up.

March 19, 2008

There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during
the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah
Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she’s a lot more
vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September
2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported
that “through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active
participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a
secretive Capitol Hill group known as the “Fellowship,” aka The Family. But it
won’t be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet’s shocking exposé, The Family:
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published
in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama’s church a “cult,” but that term applies far
more aptly to Clinton’s “Family,” which is organized into “cells” – their term –
and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia.
In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family’s home for young men,
foreswearing sex, drugs, and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions
of Jesus and power. He wasn’t undercover; he used his own name and admitted to
being a writer. But he wasn’t completely out of danger either. When he went
outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets
calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners – alone.

The Family’s most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer
Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes
on behind the scenes – knitting together international networks of rightwing
leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family
reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that
exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole
bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper’s in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government
and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's
postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with
Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American
leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred
thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous
dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During
the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S.
government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova,
convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to
both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family’s American branch is a collection of powerful
rightwing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese,
John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family’s
spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in
Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family’s young women’s
group. And, at the Family’s frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts
of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group
composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When
she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family’s
“most elite cell,” the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his
downfall, Virginia’s notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been
a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family’s
publicity-averse leader, that he is “a unique presence in Washington: a
genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or
faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton’s rightward
legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing “religious
freedom” in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth
control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe
it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by
ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential
spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne
Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family
association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton’s involvement to the underappreciated
depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define the Family’s
theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worship
Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the “meek.” They believe
that, in mass societies, it’s only the elites who matter, the political leaders
who can build God’s “dominion” on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent
philosophy, it’s all about power – cultivating it, building it, and networking
it together into ever-stronger units, or “cells.” “We work with power where we
can,” Doug Coe has said, and “build new power where we can't.”

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the
Trinity Unity Church of Christ. Now it’s up to Clinton to explain – or, better
yet, renounce – her longstanding connection with the fascist-leaning Family.